Calvin Wells a GP and palaeopathologist whose work continues to be cited. His quirky sense of humour, however, was not to everyone’s taste.
Photograph: University of Bradford

An archaeological treasury – the voluminous collection of papers, slides, research notes, recordings, jokey postcards, and miscellaneous bits of long-dead human beings collected by the late Calvin Wells – is to be digitised to make it available in its eccentric entirety to scholars for the first time.

The archive, for which the University of Bradford has won a grant of almost £140,000 from the Wellcome Trust, includes thousands of the “bone reports” for which Wells became famous. The reports were based on boxes of human remains sent by archaeologists to Wells’s home and studied on the kitchen table.

Wells, a Norfolk-based GP is regarded as a founding figure of the discipline of palaeopathology, the study of ancient diseases. Professor Charlotte Roberts, president of the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology, said the archive would be invaluable for researchers: “Calvin Wells remains one of the most prolific publishers from the UK in this field today, who studied a diversity of subject matter from artistic representations of disease in the past to mummified remains. In many instances his publications were ‘firsts’ and continue to be cited in our field today.”

A picture of a shrunken head from Calvin Wells’s slide collection. Photograph: Calvin Wells/University of Bradford

As well as the serious scientific papers, the collection includes correspondence with many of the most distinguished archaeologists of his day. Project archivist James Neill has been sorting out some of the most striking for his blog. Glyn Daniel sent a postcard of a skeleton with arms folded across its pelvis, with the message: “This character looks very distracted to me but that is perhaps because he has lost his soft parts.” More alarmingly, the Danish archaeologist Vilhelm Moller-Christensen sent a postcard of the 500-year-old skeleton which he was driving across Denmark in an effort to collect money for a new museum; he had previous driven from Denmark to a conference on leprosy in Madrid with the skeletons of ten medieval lepers as passengers.

Wells’s quirky sense of humour was not to everyone’s taste. His entry in the Journal of Medical Biology reports: “He was extremely well read, warm and encouraging to those with archaeological or medical qualifications, but vituperative about those he disliked. His bone reports, which are a major proportion of his published output, generally were highly regarded but his writing is often marred by sexual innuendo and vulgarity which does his memory little credit.”

Wells, who died in 1978, offered to leave his archive to the first UK university to establish a chair in his subject, and Bradford University got there first. As Neill explained, the collection has been split for decades between the papers held in the Special Collections, and the human remains and slides which were kept in the archaeology department as teaching aids. It will now all be brought together and digitised for the first time, although many of the slides and tapes of his many lectures and radio broadcasts will need specialist conservation work.

Wells was keenly aware of the importance of his wide correspondence, and to Neill’s delight kept hand written copies of his own replies clipped to the letters from particularly distinguished figures.

The archive, to Neill’s relief, is not absolutely comprehensive. The shrunken head which features in several of Wells’s photographs is not included, and his trousers are in the collection of Norwich museums for reasons – as with much of Wells’s life – not entirely clear .